AuthorTopic: vector live light respin. (Read 8758 times)

I'm going to again attempt a respin of vector live light. I tried before and was "almost" successful but didn't have the time to work on it.

Lately I have some more time so I wanted to give it another go.

I'm not sure all I wanted to include will fit on a dvd-r when I'm finished, so can someone tell me what can be cut from the install iso? 736 megs or so seems like alot of space for what vl light comes with. I considered a smaller footprint distro as a starting point but since I've been using vector for years I'm much more comfortable using this.

With XFCE, seems like it takes about 48-64 megs to load/run, this is great, especially for older pcs.

The respin is intended to be for creative types and include alot of multimedia apps and so on for video, graphics and audio.

Any ideas, advice or suggestions, I'm all ears. This is going to take awhile I think... Right now I'm installing virtualbox on my windows box and will be working on this in that until I assemble a spare pc for this.

1) Virtualbox is VERY slow at generating an iso. Painfully slow, takes hours on my quad core windows pc. Time for a real dedicated computer to work on this on.

2) Once you have your system installed to hard drive and set up everything, install software and so on, making a new iso is fairly straightforward.I really like this because I can make my perfect u/i, set of programs, panels, everything I want and have a ready to install backup that is already perfectly set up to my liking. Thats awesome. Even if I just use this for myself, its fantastic.

3) I have alot of work to do still, but now I know how this works... Made 2 tests of isos so far, but I'm no where near done the modding/setup and software install. There will probably be alot of trial and error for awhile until I get things right, but I can keep modding till its right.

Its certainly been a learning experience so far. I'm enjoying this tremendously.

Can anyone help with me some questions? After I've made the first couple of test isos I realized I may need to be deleting the whole tmp folder before I make more changes and making a new iso. I'd like to save the isos as I go, so if I dork something up I can return to the last previous good iso and keep working...

Yes, it's those live_data_xxxx folders that you need to keep deleting. Don't move the completed ISO to anywhere else in the file system of the installed VL Live. You don't want that to become part of the next ISO. Put it on a USB stick or on the Windows file system.

Creating an ISO does take some time, but should be less than an hour on a reasonably fast machine (P4 or better).

Its actually alot easier than I thought this was going to be. You made the process easy to do so thank you for that!

I just did what you're doing now. The bulk of the credit goes to the creators of the linux-live scripts: http://www.linux-live.org/ , Joe1962 and uelsk8s, who made the live capable kernel and packaged the live scripts. This is the beauty of the free software model; we can re-use, modify and add to previous work. You can see far when you're standing on the shoulders of giants.

Your absolutely right, thats the beauty of open software. I'll be sure to thank everyone on my respin. Its coming along, just painfully slow in virtualbox. Apparently, you can only use one processor in current virtualbox. I hope to get an extra machine setup soon to work on this with.

Looks like I should be able to cram everything I want on one dvd-R which is great, but its tough deciding what to cut to fit everything in.

There's a few things you mentioned that have me confused. You say VL Light, but then you mention XFCE. Light came without XFCE but had JWM and IceWM. Then you mention 736MB, but I'm seeing VL6.0-Light-LIVE-Final.iso at 644MB and VL6.0-Light-Final.iso at just 617.

Steven is using Light as a base for his own version and adding his favorites to it. That is very much what it was intended for, glad to see it being put to use.

As far as size goes, the reason Light is not "small", is because below the lightweight UI is a full Linux install with all the libs and dev tools. Since our repo is not as extensive as those of the Big Boys, it is important that you have the ability to build your own packages.

Your right I don't know where I got 736 at. I'm using vl-light live final which clocks in at 644 megs.

And yes, I'm using xfce as my default window manager.

I figured it included all the developer tools and thats why it was so big. Its cool as it is because when I'm done, my repsin will be on dvd-r and clock in somewhere around 4+ gigs.

I borked something good today and my hard drive install would no longer start,so I am restarting again tomorrow from my last good iso. At this rate, I'm probably a few weeks (or months hahaha) from a finished project.

I hope some of you will help be build and install some things not included in our repository. I already installed a few things that were not in our repositories. I hope I can include alot more stuff thats out there than just the stuff we already have in our repos.